UNIVERSITY OF JOS

‘Mark on the Wall’

Feminism and ecriture feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances

INAUGURAL LECTURE

BY

KANCHANA UGBABE, Ph D (Australia)

Professor of Literature

Department of English

University of Jos

[28TH JANUARY, 2011]

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‘Mark on the Wall’: Feminism and ecriture feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances

Introduction

Vice-Chancellor Sir, and Chairman of the occasion, the Deputy Vice-Chancellors (Academic and

Administration), Principal officers, Deans and Directors, fellow Professors, Heads of Departments,

Members of the University community, students, past and present, distinguished visitors and friends of

the University, Great Josites, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with a deep sense of humility that I stand before

you today to present my inaugural lecture entitled ‘Mark on the Wall’: Feminism and ecriture

feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances.

The term ‘feminism’ elicits varied responses wherever it is mentioned. It is seen by most people as

describing a bunch of aggressive and militant women who want to do away with men, marriage,

childbearing and rearing, who want to rule the world as a colony of women. Perhaps the interpretation

also is that it applies to women who are not in the traditional sense, women. This lecture attempts to

correct this misconception and trace the history of the Women’s Movement in Europe and North America,

and its implications for Africa. It is the gains and advances made by the feminist Movement that has

enabled me to stand on this stage and address this august gathering.

The term ‘ecriture feminine’ refers to women’s writing, the subject of which is often, women. It

refers to an alternate mode of perceiving the world and expressing it, other than what men have been able

to do in their writing. The ‘mark on the wall’ refers to measuring one’s height (and therefore,

achievements) by literally putting a mark on the wall.

Virginia Woolf’s statement in the 1920’s that ‘there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise

height of women’ (A Room of One’s Own 81) is an appropriate starting point in tracing the history of

Feminism and Women’s Writing in Europe and North America from the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It took more than two hundred years since women

first made their appearance in pen and paper for Virginia Woolf, on the cusp of change, to point out that

while the achievements of Shakespeare and Milton had been sung of, women writers were trapped in a

narrowly defined category called ‘woman’, the parameters of whose alternative perspective had not been

acknowledged or sufficiently understood. Virginia Woolf’s statement also implies that the existing myths

and maps of women’s ‘meagre’ achievements at the time could not be trusted.

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A Private World

The society of the 17th century was not ready for women’s stories. Women did not form part of the

reading public either as education was largely restricted to upper class males at the time. Education was

regarded as being less important for women. Realism itself was denounced as deception. The women who

wrote indulged themselves in fantasies or resorted to recording their thoughts and ideas privately, in the

form of journals and diaries which had the appearance of writing for oneself. Through this, women were

able to chart the inner and outer events of their lives, find meaning, and tap into their creative resources.

Modesty and temperance were desirable attributes in a woman (Antonia Fraser 45). The idea of a woman

laying bare her thoughts in the form of a creative work (a commodity) was tantamount to prostitution

(indecent exposure) and was met with distaste and contempt. In spite of this Lady Mary Wroath who

wrote Urania (1621), Ann Weamys who wrote a sequel to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Astell

(1668-1731), and Katharine Philips (1631-1664) who wrote fantasies under the pastoral pen name Orinda,

are worthy of mention. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a prolific dramatist who wrote plays which were

well known at the time. Rules of decorum constrained women in their expression and limited them in the

ways they could communicate their thoughts. The setbacks were many and women had to tread softly and

cautiously in the literary arena. They were expected to be domestic, available when their company was

required, decorative, and amusing. However, writing out of economic necessity brought several women to

the fore in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The writing of autobiographies and biographies (life

stories) was a natural outcome of the diary and the journal – it was a convenient transition point between

fact and fiction. And, as Dale Spender points out in Women In Isolation, it also gave women a definition:

Pen and paper for women have transformed what otherwise might have been a

sentence of solitary confinement; and writing doesn’t have to be published for

it to provide a powerful forum for its author. The history of women’s struggle for identity and

sanity – is often to be found in the pages of isolated women’s journals. (7)

Writing – A Commodity

Many changes occurred between the end of the seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth

century. The 1740’s mark the origins of the English novel as an art form. Realism becomes a reputable

means of approaching the subject matter of the novel. This is the period during which art, far from being

commissioned by the nobility, produced by the artist and received by the elite, becomes a commodity.

This is the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it today. Growth of education (for both men

and women), and the introduction of printing and publishing resulted in an expanded reading public, of

which women, curiously formed the bulk. Housewifely occupations such as the making of soap and

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candles were at the time being taken over by the marketplace. The industrial revolution had begun. The

rise of the novel has a direct relationship with the increase in women’s leisure and women’s taste for

fiction-reading. The novels written by the early male novelists featured female protagonists. Samuel

Richardson’s Pamela was a popular novel at the time. Bearing the subtitle ‘Virtue Rewarded’, the story is

told in the form of letters, from the perspective of a young servant girl who resists her master’s sexual

advances until such a time when he proposes to her and she accepts his offer of marriage. Pamela then

becomes the mistress of the estate where she had served for many years. The case for women’s chastity,

patience, and virtue is strongly made. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana are not flag bearers for

virtue but are presented as resourceful women whose life stories play on the sympathy of the reader,

particularly the woman reader of the time. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

(1792) appeared at a time when women’s voices as fictional subjects were just beginning to be heard. The

stage is set for the woman writer who has been honing her skills on the diary, the journal, and

autobiographical life stories.

Drawing Room Fiction

Jane Austen whose novels have been compared to ivory miniatures marks the triumphant entry of

the woman novelist in the literary marketplace. The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth

universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”, defines

the preoccupation of small town life – courtship and marriage. The statement could also be reversed to fit

the bill that ‘a woman in need of a good fortune must be in want of a husband!’ Jane Austen’s women are

capricious, charming, self-centred, and witty – characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma, and Fanny Price

cover a spectrum of female temperaments and attitudes. Rather than attempt to take on the world, to prove

the socio-cultural effects of the Napoleonic wars, Austen examines closely the manners and motives of

her men and women in the intimacy of the drawing room. It is a private world that is woman-centred and

marriage-centred. With ironical perspective, she traces the growth of her characters, focusing attention on

their foibles and idiosyncrasies. The intimacy of the setting (the drawing room) is carried over to the tone

of the novelist. In a genteel manner the reader is directly addressed and drawn into the vortex. A woman’s

novel situated in a domestic sphere, dealing with women’s issues (love, courtship, marriage) did not pose

a threat to male writers at the time. Jane Austen’s novels were widely read but the novelist herself in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no writing tradition to fall back upon except a male one; she had

no mentors or forbears to show the way.

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Women began to write more for economic reasons towards the end of the eighteenth century. Also

the middle class woman began to write. Marriage was a means to financial security in Jane Austen’s time

(‘a pleasantest preservative from want’). Feminine accomplishment was regarded as a lure to catch men.

A woman who had failed to find a spouse had only one avenue for financial independence – as a spinster,

she would become a governess. Governesses were not well paid, some were merely provided boarding

and lodging but they had a measure of independence. Women sought ‘good marriages’, and men sought

women of ‘good breeding’ and domestic accomplishment. Virtue continued to be upheld as one of the

chief attributes of good breeding. Tact, diplomacy, a sparkling wit, and manners pleasing to men were

also considered desirable qualities in a woman.

The Pen as a Weapon

Women became the anchor of the reading public in the nineteenth century. The number of women

who entered the arena (as prose writers) also increased during the century. Poetry however continued to

be restricted to men with the exception of writers like Elizabeth Barret Browning, Christina Rosetti and

the American Emily Dickinson who boldly wrote verse. Regarded as a ‘muted minority’ thus far, women

began to speak up, to write, to articulate and express their views. The opposition to this ‘unfeminine’

activity also grew. Dale Spender analyses the private/public domain and the roles permitted to women

(Man Made Language 191-197). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw attention to the battle of the sexes

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to gain control of the ‘no man’s land’, the world of writing

(No Man’s Land). John Stuart Mill’s observation that ‘women who read, much more, women who write,

are in the existing constitution of things a contradiction and a disturbing element’ is indicative of the

resistance faced by women (Spender 192). The pen became a pistol, a weapon of mass destruction, at least

of attempted terrorism on the part of women. The victory and the defeat in this battle which lasted well

into the twentieth century gave rise to fantasies on both sides. Rider Haggard’s novel, She (1883) is one

such a fantasy where the fictitious colony in the novel is ruled by the matriarch, She-Who-Must-Be-

Obeyed and where men are kept as subjects. But every now and then the men rise up in rebellion and kill

off the women to restore order.

Strategies - The Use of Pseudonyms

The writing of fiction gave women power and authority over their own created world. It also gave

them anonymity and continued to be a popular medium in the nineteenth century world of letters. Maria

Edgeworth (1767-1849) was one of the earliest women novelists of the nineteenth century. Margaret

Oliphant (1855), Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and Harriet Martineau (1802-

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1876) were others who wrote prose fiction. An interesting and crucial addition is the fact that women

writers adopted male pseudonyms which disguised their true identities and gave them an avenue for

publishing. When a manuscript was submitted bearing a woman’s name, the publisher invariably turned it

down. The author was judged as a ‘woman’ rather than as a writer. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans),

Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Cotton Mather Mills (Elizabeth Gaskell) and George Egerton (Mary

Chavelita Dunne Bright) were some of the names adopted. Virginia Woolf defends the use of

pseudonyms and argues that women had a natural propensity for the modesty of a veiled look and that the

pseudonym was part of this need for anonymity (A Room of One’s Own 49). Whether women were

subdued by male attitudes or otherwise, the strategy worked and the novels by women were hugely

successful. This was the beginning of the emancipation of women through the written word. The story is

told of Charlotte Bronte who tried to get the advice of her male colleague and poet, Robert Southey on her

writing. Southey politely wrote back: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not

to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties the less leisure she will have for it, even as an

accomplishment and a recreation.’(Margot Peters 54) So challenged were the men by women’s writing

skills that even the smallest steps taken by them towards authorship were seen by males as threatening

strides.

The Virtuous Wife

In the novels written by male novelists in the nineteenth century women featured as wives,

victims, seductresses, or sexless virtuous heroines. Dickens’ women are school-marmish, ‘desexualized’,

prim and proper as in David Copperfield, or they are monstrous and cruel as in Oliver Twist. The ‘fallen

woman’ draws sympathy for herself in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Anthony Trollope’s Esther

Waters. The woman in each of these novels is a victim from beginning to end. Virtue becomes

obsessively important in the Victorian period. Women’s clothing and accessories were designed to ‘cover’

even as whorehouses thrived during the period! Marriage was the ‘natural destiny’ of a middle class

woman who in the year 1800 had no vote, no right to the custody of her children and could not own

property.

The general notion was that women were creatures of feeling and emotion, men, the seat of

Reason. Men belonged to the external world of work, women to the domestic and internal world of

emotions. As a result of the industrial revolution, working class women became part of the labour market.

They became wage earners alongside the men while the Victorian moral standards confined the middle

class woman to the home. This brought about a widening of the gulf between the working class women

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who lived in crowded urban slums and worked in factories and middle class women who became the

guardians of domestic and family happiness. The art of the wife (housewife), ‘the bourgeois ideal of

decorative domesticity’ (Patricia Stubbs 35) came to be established. Barred from working outside the

home, childbearing and rearing became the wife’s major occupations besides which she served other

decorative purposes in the home and family. Patricia Stubbs captures vividly the domestic role of the

nineteenth-century woman in Women and Fiction: “Returning home from the pressures of the real world,

economic man was supposedly soothed and elevated by the spirituality, virtue and domestic charm of his

wife”(7).

Venturing beyond the Ideal

The Victorian ideal of women as passive, chaste and asexual begins to change gradually towards

the end of the nineteenth century. There is an awakening on the part of women which moves in the

direction of acquiring self knowledge and self actualization. The dichotomy experienced by the woman

writer between her outer self and her inner being is carried into the novels. The woman who had hitherto

been defined by love, marriage, and motherhood recognizes her limitations and begins to see beyond it.

These changes, and the conflict between women’s role in the public domain and her private desires and

ambitions are amply demonstrated in literature. Society did not take kindly to a writer who transcended

the conventions of the time and offered new roles to women. Publishers and editors stepped in to censor

such material. The Obscene Publications Act (1857) also served to prosecute cases of infringement. In

spite of all these, women continued to be portrayed in literature by women as being independent. Women

too were not entirely comfortable with this image. They suffered from a sense of guilt and vulnerability.

The battle of the sexes gained momentum.

The changing perspectives are evident in the women protagonists in the novels of Emily Bronte,

Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Women become sensual and sexual beings in the novels of George

Egerton (1859-1945), Olive Shreiner (1855-1920), George Moore (1852-1933) and the later Thomas

Hardy. There was a token recognition of the works of some women writers of the period. Others like

Margaret Oliphant (1855),Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), Frances Trolloppe, Mary Shelley and Harriet

Martineau had their works buried in obscurity. The term ‘Women’s Rights’ was gaining coinage with the

publication of books like Caroline Norton’s The Natural Right of a Mother to the Custody of her Child

(1837), and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).

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The Woman Question

The years 1847 to 1884 saw an increase in feminist activity as both men and women joined the

debate. The ‘Woman Question’ became the subject that occupied the minds of literary theorists, and

professionals in other fields. The ubiquity of the problem is voiced by Theodore Roszak:

By the late nineteenth centuty…this supposedly marginal curiosity called the

‘woman problem’ had become one of the most earth-shaking debates in the Western world, fully

as explosive an issue as the class or national conflicts of the

day. Here, after all, was the world’s largest oppressed ‘minority’ threatening mutiny: something

no man could ignore. And none did… The ‘woman problem’ was argues about, shouted about,

raved about, agonized about, endlessly, endlessly. By the final decades of the century, it

permeated everything. (Gilbert & Gubar 21)

The Suffrage Movement

The Women’s Suffrage Movement started in 1847 by a group of women on both sides of the

Atlantic Ocean served to accelerate women’s demands for social and political rights as a whole. In

demanding for the right to vote, women sought an acknowledgement of their voices, their role in deciding

socio-political issues. The Movement turned out to be more militant in England than in America where

women were captured in literature, visual art, and the print media as ‘battle axes’. The ‘suffragettes’ in

England went on protest marches, undertook hunger strikes, threw bricks at the windows of public

buildings, and used other violent and confrontational methods to bring about change. This caused great

confusion among the male electorate. In America, the ‘suffragists’ were moderate and of peaceful

persuasion. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony signed petitions, formed leagues

and headed the Women’s Rights Convention to muster support for women’s voting rights. Black men’s

right to vote also came under these umbrella organizations. Martha Schofield joined the Movement in

1876 by bringing a new dimension to the struggle – refusal to pay taxes. After being arrested, she wrote

‘paid under protest’ on her tax cheques. Non-violent demonstrations by women across the United States

eventually brought about an amendment in Congress.

Women like the cartoonist Lou Rogers (1879-1952) used the art form of the cartoon to promote

suffrage and enfranchise American women. (Alice Sheppard 77-90) In Rogers’ cartoon called

‘Transferring the Mother habit to Politics: Woman Voter: Are your hands clean son?’, the woman voter is

portrayed as being larger than the diminutive male candidate seeking public office. The woman voter is

presented as a guardian of society, one who wishes to rid society of the ills of corruption. Women also

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sought the ballot to overcome patriarchal oppression and expose corruption in government. Gaining the

vote meant that women could protect themselves and their children from being marginalized. Blanche

Ames’ ‘Double the Power of the Home: Two Good Votes are better than One’ appeared in Woman’s

Journal 23 (Oct 1915). Nina Allender’s ‘Come to Mother’ appeared in The Suffragist 31 (March 1917).

The female cartoonists continued to portray the woman voter as a nurturing mother figure who served as a

protector and guardian of society.

Male cartoonists on the other hand saw the suffragettes as ‘unsexed’, unattractive, bespectacled

old maids with an axe to grind. Rodney Thomson’s cartoon in Life Magazine vol.61, no.1587, March 27,

1913 presents women suffragettes as ruthless militants: ‘As they are; As they Think they are; As they

appear to the Police and Shopkeepers’ (No Man’s Land 19). Frederick Harrison enjoined women in 1891

to preserve their femininity, that ‘to keep the family true, refined, affectionate, faithful, is a grander task

than to govern the state’ (Stubbs 7).

In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed giving American women the right to vote. In

the same year the English political landscape witnessed victory for women – the vote.

The New Woman

The turn-of the-century woman was not only on the way to gaining the vote and the freedom that

went with it, she began to explore other areas of her experience (other than the emotional) in her writings.

The New Woman (as she came to be called), with fewer constraints and greater autonomy, symbolized a

feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Divorce in middle class circles was impossible

for women before 1857 but conventions were being flouted thereafter. By 1870, the first Married

Women’s Property Act had been passed and by 1882, an Act was passed which allowed women the right

to their income. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ came to symbolize the resistance

offered by women to conventional roles assigned them by the patriarchy. This short story, along with

Kate Chopin’s works (The Awakening, ‘The Story of an Hour’, ‘The Storm’) which disappeared from

view during the lifetime of the writers in question, have been reclaimed from the ‘margins and footnotes

of history’ by feminist writers of the later part of the twentieth century. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a

simple and poignant story of a young woman’s descent to madness during the period of post-natal

depression. It is at the same time a complex exploration of a woman’s sense of guilt as an ‘incomplete’

wife and mother, her suppressed desire to ‘write’, to give voice to her innermost feelings, and the world of

the subconscious that manifests itself as insanity when she is denied the opportunity. Kate Chopin’s

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characters stand on the threshold of acquiescence and resistance, exploring psychological states that

betray forbidden desires. ‘My outer self conforms but my inner self rebels’, her characters seem to say.

Unconventional and innovative, the novels and short stories of this nature were not well received at the

time. They were seen as being vulgar and bawdy and their subjects unmentionable. The authors were

silenced as their books disappeared from public view. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an activist in the

Women’s Movement also published Women and Economics (1898), and Herland, a novel. Kate Chopin’s

writings hinted at marriage as captivity, besides giving the women characters the space to explore

candidly alternative life-situations. In an early short story, ‘Emancipation- A Life Fable’, Chopin presents

the image of the caged animal which finds contentment in its condition until the day the cage door is left

open. George Egerton, the woman writer, focused on the runaway wife in ‘Virgin Soil’( Discords, 1894),

and Olive Schreiner wrote of the brutality and cruelty of a husband in The Story of an African Farm

(1883). In the words of the feminist critic, Dale Spender: ‘Women invented fiction as an alternative to

patriarchy, and that in writing and reading women have founded an alternative community, one which

counters some of the isolation of women’s lives and allows us to participate in a culture of resistance’

(Women In Isolation 3).

Feminism

As the Woman Question and the Woman’s Cause gathered momentum towards the end of the

nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the term Feminism (first used in the 1890’s) came to typify

the Women’s Movement. The Movement which grew and developed several ideological branches in the

course of the twentieth century, drew attention to the glaring inequalities in the way society treated men

and women. The different schools of thought came together under the common assumption that Western

society inherently privileged men and subjugated women in every cultural sphere, even to the extent that

women themselves gave support to the subordination of their sex. A proliferation of debates and theories

and subversive writings contributed to consciousness-raising throughout the twentieth century. From the

conservative end of the spectrum to the radical, class, race, and gender theories defined the intersections

and contradictions in feminist interest groups. While there is no defining feminist document, the new

consciousness gave rise to numerous and competing philosophical studies in Europe and North America.

Virginia Woolf – Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf is an iconic figure in the history of feminism and women’s writing. Her statement

that ‘there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women’ serves as a defining moment in

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feminist consciousness. Novelist, essayist and activist, her works include Mrs Dalloway, Night and Day,

Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, Between the Acts, Books and Portraits,

and The Years. The narrative shape of her writing, particularly in Mrs Dalloway has come to be called the

‘stream of consciousness’ method, a method which resists linear narration and moves away from a

coherent narrative shape. In A Room of One’s Own, her feminist manifesto, she explores the nature of

women’s writing and the conditions (constraints included) under which women write. ‘A woman must

have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ declares Woolf (6). The author casts her

mind back to the eighteenth-century women who wrote out of economic necessity, and the nineteenth-

century women who wrote amidst the hustle and bustle of the living room and the parlour. ‘If Shakespeare

had a gifted sister called Judith…’ she speculates. ‘Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women

as it must have existed among the working classes’ (48). Both were marginalized and ignored.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf undertakes a historical evaluation of seventeenth-

century women writers such as Lady Winchilsea, Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, and Aphra

Behn. She makes the point that women’s achievements went beyond the derogatory stereotypes of harlots

and courtesans, or the upper class woman reclining in the parlour with a fan and a lap dog for company.

The ordinary woman’s life was buried in obscurity. Her activities went entirely unrecorded (84-85).

Virginia Woolf has also contributed substantially to the feminine aesthetic by defining the

contours of women’s writing, and fiction-writing as a whole. ‘Fiction is like a spider web,’ she says,

‘attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is

scarcely perceptible’ (A Room of One’s Own 41). This definition of art as a spider web goes contrary to

male, formalist notions of art as ‘sublime’, ‘objective’, and ‘universal’. Here the form of the web (art) is

scarcely visible, but its function is to trap insects (the economic function of art). Art, women maintain, is

subjective, and embedded in ‘life’, and serves the artist as a means of survival. (Aesthetics in Feminist

Perspective 28) In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf speaks on behalf of originality rather than

convention. ‘Life is a luminous halo’ she says, ‘a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the

beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is seen as a classic feminist text

with its silences, gaps, giving expression to the ‘enigmas of female experience.’ (Voyage In 184) Woolf

felt that women were ‘unhistoried’ (mark on the wall, again,) and that the woman writer had to cling to

what was available as the art of foremothers – Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes. Elaine

Showalter, the feminist critic emphasizes the fact that the turn-of-the-century woman writer experimented

with new fictional forms such as the embedded narrative, and also ‘keynotes, allegories, fantasies,

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monochromes or dreams’ (The Awakening 175). Mrs Dalloway, the novel is also innovative in its

‘palimpsestic layering of plots’ in the course of which the author’s subversive intentions are skillfully

hidden in the text, and periodically inscribed. (Gilbert and Gubar) Virginia Woolf maintained that killing

the ‘Angel in the House’ was part of the responsibilities of the woman writer. The Angel in the House

was a popular Victorian image of the ideal (devoted and submissive) wife and woman. Woolf’s

conclusion is that men’s accomplishments were documented and celebrated while women’s

accomplishments were buried in obscurity. ‘Columbus discovered America, Newton the laws of gravity.

Aeroplanes were invented by men. But there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of

women’ ( A Room of One’s Own 81).

Simone de Beauvoir – Sex versus Gender

From the 1920’s onwards, women increasingly questioned the stereotypical roles assigned them

by custom and tradition. At the same time, notions of femininity kept women in bondage of guilt. They

feared success; they hesitated to use their initiative, they under-achieved and feared being branded

‘aggressive’, or ‘shrill and strident’. European and North American women inherited notions of

womanhood and femininity from their middle class forbears. A crucial landmark in feminist publishing is

Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which maintained that sex was determined by biology and

anatomy, but gender was a societal and cultural construct. It was Western society that had deemed woman

‘minus male’ (female). ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’ is de Beauvoir’s famous

statement. ‘It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…which is described as feminine’. de

Beavoir’s work highlighted the fact that women themselves were taught to internalize patriarchal

ideologies to such an extent, and over such a long period of time that women believed in their secondary

status. Western cultures nurtured women to be meek, passive, acquiescent, emotional, sensitive and

intuitive while men went out and conquered the world. de Beauvoir’s ground breaking work has given

women confidence and enabled generations of women to re-conceptualize a woman-centred symbolic

order.

‘The Problem that had no Name’

In North America of the 1950’s, the social scenario was almost Jane Austenian in its expectations

for women. Middle class American women assumed the roles of goddesses of the suburban home. Girls

enrolled in college to find husbands. The college campus of the 1950’s became the hunting ground for

marriage partners. The body beautiful received much attention as blonde hair and tight fitting clothes

accentuated its attributes. Once out of college, the young woman settled down to life in the suburban

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home with her husband and four children and the station wagon parked in the driveway. As a suburban

housewife and mother, her dream had been accomplished. Consumer magazines used the figure of the

housewife to advertise labour-saving gadgets and home products. In this dream world, career for women

naturally acquired a bad reputation. It was women who could not find husbands who ‘resorted’ to careers.

Everything spelt happiness for a while as women became ‘experts’ in determining the quality of washing

soap, exchanged cookery tips, and shared child minding rosters. In the late 1950’s a strange emptiness

crept into their lives as they experienced a disconnect between what they were expected to feel (happy,

fulfilled wives and mothers), and the reality of their lives. The ‘problem that had no name’ reared its head.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) gave voice to this problem that women needed something

more than a well-fitted kitchen, a manicured lawn, wall-papered suburban home, and cute, baby doll

clothing to find fulfillment.

The book questioned the woman’s true identity. Did she have a life of the mind? What did she see

when she looked at herself in the mirror each day? It offered women a life-plan which included a career,

and choices in life. The rumblings of discontent grew louder. The glorious suburban home now became a

prison which circumscribed and curtailed a woman’s freedom. Marriage itself became an institution for

asserting male superiority and enslaving women. Housework and child care, which in the earlier days

were the ‘natural’ duties of a woman, now came to be classified as unpaid labour. Women complained

that society took them for granted. They were not appreciated and received no remuneration for their

work in the home. Betty Friedan’s surveys pointed to the problem:

‘I feel empty somehow…’

‘I feel as if I don’t exist’.

‘But who am I…?’

The world of advertising presented women as all body and no mind, frivolous and child-like in looks and

reasoning. The consumer world got fierce when women complained of fatigue and saw housework as

drudgery. New strategies were invented to tranquillize women with products which would give them a

sense of mastery over their homes. Betty Friedan’s book identified the ‘housewife trap’ and suggested that

women could have a ‘life’ both within and outside the home. The author recommended that women

should focus on themselves first, and next on what they could contribute to society. She reassured them

that there was no conflict in having a career and in being a wife and a mother at the same time.

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The Second Wave of Feminism – Consciousness-Raising

Thus began the second wave of feminism in the late 1960’s. Its full flowering came in the 1970’s

and 1980’s. Throughout this period feminism as a concept developed and expanded to embrace every

aspect of women’s lives. Consciousness-raising (CR) helped to deconstruct and transform the beliefs and

behavior of women. It created intense anxiety among men who felt ‘emasculated’ and ‘unmanned’ by the

myth of the fiery, ‘man-eating’ feminist. Set against the loveless and career-loving feminist, male writing

propagated the picture of the doe-eyed wife and mother cosseted by the family, surrounded by the devoted

husband and loving children.

Militant Feminism- 1970’s

The 1970’s were the most exciting years for the European and North American feminists as they

militantly grasped the wheel and changed the course of their lives. From the symbolic burning of

women’s inner garments in public, to sloganeering, undertaking demonstrations, and the wearing of

badges to indicate allegiance, feminists across the Western world saw a need for urgent and militant

action. Elaine Showalter, the feminist critic observes that the feminist movement of the 1970’s had the

‘urgency and excitement of a religious awakening’. It put more than a sparkle in women’s eyes. Some of

the slogans of the period include:

‘Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not

difficult.’

‘A Woman’s place is in the House - and the Senate’

‘Beware of a man who praises Women’s Liberation. He is about to quit his job’

‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’

Pop songs of the 1970’s carried the message: ‘I am strong. I am invincible. I am woman’ (Helen Reddy).

It was a song which became an anthem for the women’s liberation movement. It reached No.1 on the

Billboard Charts in 1972, won the Grammy Award and sold more than a million copies. It was a song that

expressed the growing passion for female empowerment. Another is Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I will Survive’

(1979).

The feminine mode of dressing was yielded up for trousers and T shirts. Birth control pills and devices

gave women a measure of control over their bodies and their reproductive lives. The Movement came to

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be starkly called Women’s Liberation in the 70’s. Later decades toned it down to Women’s emancipation,

Feminism, and Womanism (among black women).

Shere Hite’s research in the 1970’s, on sexuality from women’s perspective articulated issues

which had hitherto been one-sided or unmentionable. Her questionnaires provided a framework for

interpreting women’s sexuality and male psychology, and the results were more revealing than those

arrived at by the Kinsey Reports and Masters and Johnson. Women saw great value in the Hite Reports on

Sexuality, Love, and Emotion, but men branded Hite a sex therapist and tried to trivialize her findings.

Hite remains a ‘chronicler and predictor’ of social change in the history of feminism.

Feminist Theories

The leading feminists of the 1970’s who had a lasting influence on the trajectory of the Movement

in subsequent decades include Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Dale Spender.

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970 ) challenged women to be determined in seeking release

from patriarchal oppression. ‘The onus is on women who must not only equal men in the race for

employment but outstrip them’ she said. (135) Her book dispelled the ‘middle class myth of love and

marriage’, branding housewives as ‘slaves’, and women as ‘spiritual cripples’. Shulamith Firestone’s The

Dialectic of Sex (1970 ) adopted a Marxist interpretation of Feminism and saw men and women within the

biological family unit as inherently unequal when it came to the distribution of power. Firestone

maintained that discrimination based on biological and reproductive differences formed the foundations of

a class system where men imposed their tyranny over women and children. She advocated a sexual

revolution to eliminate the underclass (women), and give women control over their fertility and their

reproductive functions. Kate Millet’s book Sexual Politics (1970) adopted the polemical stance by

identifying the subjugation of women as being at the centre of Western society’s cultural arrangement.

Social institutions in the West ‘covertly manipulated power to subordinate women’ she said. Women were

treated as sexual objects by male writers such as D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and John

Genet. Dale Spender’s Man Made Language (1980) made the radical claim that men have constructed

women’s silence and invisibility through a monopoly of the English language. As inventors and

innovators of language, men have manipulated reality and made spoken and written language work in

their favour.

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The Real Feminists?

In the early 1980’s the male literati came up with the term ‘post-feminism’ to divide the

Movement, make a mockery of its Cause and ultimately silence the followers. It was also the period

when Third World women felt marginalized from the broad tenets of the Movement. Black women did

not identify with the issues of feminism which they saw as being largely white and middle-class. Alice

Walker coined the term ‘Womanism’ – the repudiation of feminism by women of colour. Womanism was

more inclusive in its concerns than feminism was. European and North American feminists continued to

write about women’s rights but more and more, their perspectives became sterile ground of post-

feminism. (Guardian Weekly, May 18, 1997) Third World women rose to meet the challenges of hunger

and poverty. They mobilized and networked in a bid to overcome the forces that threatened their

livelihood and survival. Sheila Rowbotham in the Guardian Weekly article calls them ‘the real feminists’

tackling the world’s ‘real problems’. The example of SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) in

India with a membership of 200,000 women, Women of the Waterfront (the Liverpool docks) and

Women against Pit Closures in England are cited. These women sought the welfare of their families. They

mobilized for a better environment for their children to grow up in. Feminism they felt, was not a

movement of a privileged few but a movement about social rights, about fighting injustice as it affected

thousands of women and their families. They supported their men folk in seeking price cuts, social

improvements and in resisting environmental degradation.

The ‘post-feminist male’ of the 1980’s and early 1990’s was even more confused than his female

counterpart. Robert Bly’s book Iron John (1990) explored the male identity crisis. The book was a

bestseller in the US for forty weeks. Men enrolled in self-help groups and attended seminars to reclaim

their manhood. Men it appeared had no role models in their fathers, Bly maintains, and harks back to

mythology and legend for models.

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a crack appeared in the relationship between British and

American feminists. Certain American feminists were very visible and their views were heard whether

they affirmed or contradicted each other. Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi Camille Paglia, and Katie Roiphe

were names heard across the Atlantic. Feminism in America was ‘white’ and ‘middle class’, and did not

find sympathizers among black women. Black women sought to address issues concerning race.

Affirmative action was a dirty phrase. Non-Western women were less concerned with identity matters and

patriarchal put-downs than with basic issues regarding their income and how it affected their families.

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Feminism and Motherhood

What was the colour or shade of feminism in Britain? The British papers in the 1980’s presented

feminists in all kinds of unflattering ways, as man-haters, as women with unshaved legs and page-boy

haircuts, circulating a confused philosophy. British women, meanwhile, feminists or not, seemed to be

suffering in isolation. Equality at work, equal pay for equal work, and enhanced work opportunities were

at the centre of their concerns. Young British mothers who went out to work experienced a strange

conflict between motherhood (which required their presence at home), and the need to join the workforce

and be economically independent. Childbirth took a toll on them emotionally and they were unable to

cheerfully return to work leaving children behind. Issues concerning women’s post-natal emotional states

and their need to remain at home with infants before returning to work (the Maternity Leave) had to be

addressed. Natasha Walters’ The New Feminism, Melissa Benn’s Madonna and Child: Towards a New

Politics of Motherhood, and Kate Figes’ Life After Birth: What even your Friends won’t tell you about

Motherhood explored women’s life-changing experiences and the change in their outlook with the onset

of motherhood. The working mother’s conflicts, her gains and losses were outlined in Jayne Buxton’s

Ending the Mother War, Starting the Workplace Revolution. The problem of juxtaposing work and family

had been treated lightly in the feminist zeal for work and career. A new kind of feminist emerged, a career

woman who valued the feminine and maternal tradition and did not fit the aggressive battle-axe model.

(Maureen Freely) The problem, women realized could not be addressed by them in isolation. The man

was out at work while the woman had her own career to attend to. In spite of an overwhelming bodily

fatigue and confusion of the mind, the feminist mantra did not lose its appeal – ‘I am whole, loving,

giving, affirming, enlightening…’ The feminists realized that men and women had to jointly face the task

of caring for children and going to work.

Women’s Studies

By the mid-1990’s women had overcome, up to a point, the conflict between motherhood and a

career. They felt fairly secure in their places of work; they found that they did not have to dance through

minefields to progress in their career. They could stop claiming victim-status. They had gone past the

stage of screaming about exclusion. Now they could write about inclusion. Whatever horror stories

women had to tell concerning discrimination could be written down as history of Women’s Studies.

Women’s fashions in clothing changed radically in the 1990’s as the Beauty myth gave way to ‘fitness’

and the need for an athletic body, the major concern being self sufficiency. This was the era of ‘shoulder

pads’ for women’s dresses creating the visual affirmation of strength. Women were ‘empowering’

themselves in more ways than one.

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A major breakthrough in the progress of the Women’s Movement which could be compared to the

Suffrage movement was the introduction of Women’s Studies as an academic discipline in European and

North American universities. Women’s narratives were consolidated, research into women’s situations

undertaken, and archival material retrieved and re-assessed. Women’s Studies became a respectable

forum for women to actually put a ‘mark on the wall’. It started off as pioneering postgraduate,

interdisciplinary programmes in the early 1980’s. By the end of the decade, Women’s Studies had gained

widespread academic respectability. Existing academic disciplines came under the scrutiny of feminist

perspectives. Gender became a legitimate tool to enable us understand the world around us. Feminism

claimed that the ‘personal is political’ and pushed it as an intellectual pursuit. This included the origins of

sex differences, the relationship between paid and unpaid work, violence against women, women and

reproductive rights, the concept and practice of the family in the Western world, media representations of

women, and so on. Housed in the faculties of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Women’s Studies

served to propagate feminist ideology. It was highly influential in changing legislation in favour of

women.

The Academy, through Women’s Studies fostered a sisterhood among women who held different

shades of opinion but agreed on broad assumptions concerning patriarchy and the subordination of

women. The sisterhood gave women a sense of community, and security in belonging to a group of

likeminded women. The Women’s Studies programmes also encouraged mentoring across generations.

As women began to redefine themselves in the 1980’s and 90’s in a new political and cultural

environment, they acknowledged the strides made by the older feminists which had opened the door for

the empowering of younger women. Feminism was no longer a monolithic Movement or ideology but

occupied the overlapping spaces between postcolonial discourse, race, and ethnicity.

The Third Wave – 1990’s

The third wave of feminism came about in the 1990’s as a hybrid involvement with culture. The

Movement also acquired technological configurations as the feminists used the internet to their advantage.

The vista broadened so that, what was previously restricted as women’s issues now became economic,

ethical, and family issues that were central to both men and women. Some schools of feminism parted

company at this point but others joined and strengthened the various strands of the Movement. It became

a feminist imperative to remove social, political, and economic discrimination based on sex and gender,

and change human consciousness concerning equality. Women’s rights were based on individual

accomplishments as men’s were. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar jointly authored The Madwoman in the

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Attic (1979), a book which traced the inaccurate representations of women in the Nineteenth century

British novel. Male writers tended to categorize female characters as either angelic or as rebellious

madwomen. Their second book, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth century

(1988) established the on-going battle between the sexes in the world of letters, using the pen both as an

instrument of violence but also as a therapeutic and image-building instrument. Feminist critics also

sought to recover the voices of ‘lost’ women writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, Charlotte

Perkins Gilman, among others. The biographies of women like the suffragettes, Susan B. Anthony and

Abigail Adams served to encourage women. Women academics undertook a ‘re-reading’ and ‘re-

visioning’ of women authors to identify the hidden meanings inscribed in the texts. As Adrienne Rich

puts it: ‘A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse would take the work first of all as a clue to

how we live, how we have been living, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, and how we

can begin to see – and therefore live – afresh.’

Gynecriticism – ‘ecriture feminine’

It is during the third wave of feminism (1990 to 2000) that the feminine aesthetic, a

feminine/feminist mode of writing and perceiving the world has come into its own. As a critical tool in

the discipline of literary criticism, feminist criticism has its distinct parameters and attributes. Elaine

Showalter, the feminist critic identifies three phases in the development of women’s writing. The phase

1840 to 1880, she calls the ‘Feminine phase’, when women resorted to oblique, subversive, and ironic

strategies, and the use of pseudonyms to have their voices heard. The period 1880 to 1920, she calls the

Feminist phase when the deferential posture was abandoned for a more assertive and vocal expression,

and coincided with gaining the vote for women. From 1920 onwards Showalter believes that women’s

writing has foregrounded and valourized Female Experience, domestic or otherwise. Showalter proposed

‘gynocriticism’ as a valid tool for assessing women’s writing. The twenty-first century has popularized

expressions and terms such as ‘matrifocal’, ‘matriarchal’, and gynocentric’ with reference to women’s

writing based on the root words gyne (woman) and its opposite andros (man). Gynecriticism as the term

implies is an approach to literature from the female perspective, providing a female structure for the

analysis and appreciation of literature produced by women. Gynecriticism is not hierarchichal but

wholistic and inclusive. It endorses female experience without invalidating the male mode of perceiving

the world. It attempts an analysis of the syntactic and lexical features as well as those attributes termed

‘involved’ in women’s texts. Helene Cixous, Julie Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray have traced and defined

‘ecriture feminine’ or women’s writing as giving free play to the ‘pre-linguistic potentiality of the

unconscious’ (M.H.Abrams 238). It is multidimensional. It subverts the repressed, the logical, the

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reasoned phallocentric discourse allowing for multiple meanings and a layered texture within the text. The

structures of signification are altered in the female text giving rise to intertextuality (a term popularized by

Julie Kristeva), where allusions and covert references and echoes of previous texts overlap to become a

‘site of an intersection of numberless other texts’.(Abrams, 285)

The concept of an ‘ecriture feminine’ or feminine writing has been proposed and established by

French feminists in the late twentieth century, with Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray in the forefront. In

The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous challenges women to break away from the restrictive definitions

of the past and write with abandon, inscribing the myriad rhythms, metaphors, symbolic resonances, and

sound patterns that are part of women’s natural writing process. (Susan Sellers) She uses the works of the

Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector as an important example of ecriture feminine. The narrative matrix of

women’s writing bears evidence of their ‘awakening’ to a new order which challenges the rules of linear

logic and objectivity. Women’s meanings, on the contrary, are to be found in the buried subtexts, in blank

pages, gaps, borders, spaces, and even silence, all symbolizing women’s absence from culture. Cixous

points out that writers like Lispector do not retreat from the difficult, ugly, or painful but overcome

obstacles by an honest and loving appraisal of the Self and the Other.

Women writers and critics in the first decade of the 21st century see art as deeply contextual and

far removed from the objectivity and depersonalization suggested by male authorities such as T.S.Eliot.

Display of emotion is central to art, be it anger, grief, or frustration, and that art is functional in form and

execution as Virginia Woolf’s spider web so visually signifies. African-American women draw an

analogy between women’s writing and quilt-making. The episodic plot is joined together like the pieces

of a patchwork quilt, creating an effect of extraordinary beauty and complexity. Toni Morrison uses what

she calls ‘re-memory’ and multiple points of view in the story making process. The palimpsestic and

layered texture of women’s art also puts it on a different plane from those produced by men.

Economic Empowerment in the 21st century

Women’s economic empowerment is the greatest social change that has come about in the twenty-

first century. There are two million more women students graduating from American universities than

men. Girls are getting better results than boys at school and university. Women constitue the majority of

the workforce in North America today, juggling motherhood and career, and leadership positions with

great aplomb. They start and run their own businesses as well as heading multinational corporations like

Pepsi Cola. The recession has meant that many men are out of work while their spouses control the

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finances and do a ‘double shift’ – that of being wife and worker. The two-income family has also

become the norm rather than the exception in the Western world, and in many cases, the women earn

more then men. The concept of the Female Bread Winner (FBW) has become a reality in the

contemporary world. There appears to be less and less of a social stigma attached to husbands and wives

reversing traditional roles in the home. Women are powerful and confident and have gained the right to

choose. Not only has the glass ceiling been shattered, even entire structures have been dismantled.

The beginnings of this change go a long way back as we have seen, from women’s access to

education, the vote, to the industrialization of society as a whole. The contraceptive pill gave women the

means to limit and plan their families. In many homes in the West, there is a partnership, with husbands

and wives contributing in different spheres, but as equal partners. The post-industrial society and

improved technology has provided homes with gadgets such as the vacuum cleaner, dish washer, and the

microwave. Pre-cooked meals, fast food and freezers have taken the sweat out of household chores. The

home is even remotely run from the Blackberry today.

The feminization of the workforce has meant that society’s mindset and expectations have

changed. In the early days of feminism, women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men,

regardless of the constraints of motherhood. Today’s successful women contend that in order to fulfill

their potential, they must not play by men’s rules. They claim that there are skills which come naturally to

women such as flexibility, planning, team work, organizing, and multitasking which they rely upon to

achieve success. Their unique management skills and wisdom are being harnessed to hard work and

perseverance. The new feminists (twenty first century) maintain that they are ‘wired differently from

men.’ (‘Womenomics’, The Economist, January 2, 2010) Rather than being aggressive, they are

consensus-seeking. They are ‘less competitive, more collaborative, less power-obsessed, more group-

oriented’.

As women hit the ground running, and choose to remain on the fast lane, the home and family

have taken on new configurations. Many professional women delay childbearing till they are well

established in their careers. Some have rejected motherhood altogether. In Switzerland, forty percent of

women of childbearing age are childless out of choice. The Scandinavian countries give fathers paternity

leave while mothers go to work. France gives incentives to families that choose to have an extra child.

China has a one-child policy (and that child should preferably be a boy). Female foeticide is punishable

by law but widely practiced in India. In 2010, the Western world is trying to grapple with the social

22

consequences of the emancipation of women – rising divorce rates, single-parent families, surrogate

motherhood, and so on. In Britain and North America, sexism is no longer the issue but motherhood and

childcare. With Mum at the Board Meeting, are children the losers, ask the tabloids.

We Did It!

Is there a mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women’s accomplishments?

Yes, there certainly is! During the Second World War, the British government used slogans like ‘We can

do it’ to enlist women into the workplace while the men folk were at the warfront. Seventy years later, in

every sphere of activity, women say emphatically, ‘We did it!’ Have men welcomed the social change?

Do they feel emasculated? Men have had to reinvent themselves and their masculinity and are learning to

adjust to the notion of being ‘domestic co-laborers’. Economic necessity has driven men to accept the

shift in the marriage bargain and the power configurations within it.

As we look to the future of the family in Europe and North America and its influence over

the rest of the world, one thing becomes clear. As men and women engage in the new partnership, as

women take their place in the workforce, the Art of the Wife, we are told, is fast disappearing. Sandra

Tsing Loh, (New York Times, Jan 24, 2009) speaking on behalf of the twenty-first century professional

woman has the final word on the subject:

‘As the breadwinner, I wish to be the husband, hence what I am looking for

is a wife – a loyal helpmeet who keeps the home fires burning and offers

uncritical emotional support when I, the gladiator return exhausted from

the arena. Who are the men without money who can adapt to such a role?’

In the final analysis, Tsing Loh says we all want a wife.

Women Writers in Africa

The history of European and North American women writers over a period of three hundred years

gives us a perspective to view the works of African women writers. Historically African women

participated fully in the production and dissemination of oral literature and other art forms. Their artistic

expression and involvement have been multifaceted and diverse. Weaving, dyeing, pottery, beadwork,

leatherwork, wall-painting, basket-making – these are some of the art forms through which African

women have expressed their skill and imagination. Their creativity has resulted in works that are

23

functional, that serve a purpose for the women themselves, the village, and the community. As

composers, they present marriage songs, lullabies, songs to tease young girls, and songs for festive

occasions and for funerals. Women have their place as oral narrators, telling stories to children and adults

and recreating myths and legends. The general picture that emerges indicates that African women have

always had their autonomy. They have played a part in palace administration, they have headed women’s

groups and societies, have formed their own groups, associations and title societies. They have led

resistance groups against the colonial administration and have had economic independence through

farming and trading. Pre-colonial African women, the historical records maintain, occupied positions

complementary rather than subordinate to men.

In postcolonial Africa, women experience the positive and the negative alongside the men. They

have been at the receiving end of neocolonialism, urban migrations, and cultural transitions. Wars and

conflicts, successive military regimes and their squandering of public funds, depleted economies, floods

and famine – they all have women at their centre, striving to keep their families alive and together. Unlike

Western women, African women have not had the luxury of being solely writers until perhaps the 21st

century. They have had to tend to the land, grow vegetables, attend to the needs of the extended family,

and incidentally, write. Postcolonial African women have resisted feminist labels though in practice they

have transcended stereotypical roles assigned to them and occupy positions alongside the men.

In the anthologies of the 1960’s and 1970’s African women’s writing did not find a place.

Women’s presence was marginally acknowledged in African literature of the time. In the past thirty years

though, an increasing number of African women writers have taken up the pen. Education for women has

become more widespread in Africa. Many African countries have taken up the girl child as a project, to

nurture and raise women to occupy managerial and leadership roles in the public sphere. Charlotte

Bruner’s Unwinding Threads (1983), and African Women’s Writing (1993) gave exposure, for the first

time to emerging and established women writers on the continent. African women had a distinctive voice

which became audible not only in women’s gatherings but in their short stories, novels, drama, and

poetry.

What did African women writers model their writings on? Like their early European and North

American counterparts, African women writers had no foremothers (in fiction) to look up to for

inspiration. They found themselves in uncharted territories. It is the educated African woman who has

access to publishing as she tries to do what her male colleagues have done, or what women in other parts

24

of the world have done. Her originality expressed itself in her choice of themes (a female world presented

with feminine intuition) and in the use of the English language.

African women have largely written about themselves and their immediate concerns. Tradition

and social institutions have posed a threat to the well being of the African woman. Women value tradition

and seek to preserve it where its blind practices do not oppress them. Polygamy, motherhood,

widowhood, female circumcision rites, among others have assigned women prescribed roles, some of

which are seen as being negative and retrogressive practices.

The constraints that the European women faced and had to overcome were many. It is not that the

African woman was free of constraints but the constraints in her case did not outweigh the freedoms.

Patriarchy has not overtly stood in the way of women’s writing and publishing on the continent.

Marginalization through neglect has largely been responsible for the fact that women are latecomers to the

publishing scene. The constraints faced by the African woman are more to do with the choices she has

had to make- the priority of husband, children, and extended family commitments over writing. Virginia

Woolf’s recommendations of a space and money of her own as prerequisites for women’s writing does

not always work in Africa. Women write while sharing a communal space. Largely speaking, African

women have no common oppressor or foe, no perceived enemy of progress except poverty and

underdevelopment.

Conclusion - Appreciation

I would like to thank the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jos for giving me this opportunity

to present my work before this august gathering. The Inaugural Lecture series at the University of Jos has

provided a platform for the town and gown to meet, and to be informed of the scholarly work that is being

carried out at this institution. My appreciation goes to the Inaugural Lecture Committee, headed by

Professor Nasir, the PRO of the University of Jos, Mr. Otowo, and the Publications division.

I started work as a young, impressionable, foundation member of the University of Jos in 1979

when the University was still in the town campus in Gangare, Jos. As the University grew and developed,

moved to the Bauchi Road campus, and then to the Permanent site, I too grew with it. Several generations

of students have been responsible for my growth, some of them completed their higher degrees and came

back to join me as colleagues in the English department. Some have gone on to become distinguished

novelists, politicians, academics, and even feminists! Over the past thirty odd years, I have benefitted

25

from academic interaction with several brilliant and outstanding scholars of the University of Jos. I would

like to humbly acknowledge the debt I owe to Professors Gerald Moore, Ayo Mamudu, Nicholas

Pweddon, and Francis Ngwaba, among others. The Administration of the University of Jos has always

been cooperative and encouraging, lending strong support whenever and wherever needed. The University

has stood for the highest standards of excellence in academia – I am proud to have belonged to this

institution and to have had my entire career shaped by it.

As for feminism – I believe in the equality of men and women, and that both have to be measured

and assessed by the same standards. I have lived through and experienced the historic changes to the

position of women outlined in this paper. The University of Jos is one of the few institutions in this

country and continent with an operative gender policy. I am not a victim of patriarchy, nor a casualty of

male supremacy. Male colleagues, male students, father, husband, and sons (and daughters) have

anchored me, given me moral support, and rejoiced with me in my achievements. In the course of my

years at the University of Jos, I have helped to produce Ph.D’s of differing shades of feminism, radical,

conservative, and accomodationist and they have taken their place in the world. My thanks go also to the

women of this University, the sisterhood of female colleagues and female students who have been a

source of constant inspiration for me.

I would like to express my appreciation for my colleagues in the English department. Over the

years, the department has functioned like a family.

My IT-savvy children have always been there for me, setting up PowerPoint presentations,

undertaking internet research, sharing ideas with me, and helping me to make the transition to the

technological age. I am grateful to Onche, Isaac, Lauren(daughter-in-law), Padma, and Zara.

My gratitude goes to my husband whose male strength and companionship and concern for the

family enabled me to pursue my career with confidence. I am grateful to him for pointing me to

excellence, for being my fellow-traveller on my journey, an unfailing mentor to look up to and depend on,

for paving my pathway with flagstones for smooth walking, and for being there at the end of the road to

celebrate with me. He is a unique man and a true feminist.

I give glory to God for His infinite mercies.

26

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